Ragnaros lava wave timing

General Discussion
1

Hello.

I just wanted to share some useful knowledge on how to use lava wave properly.
To optimise the use of lava wave, you have to cast it at the right time as to spawn kill a fresh new wave of minions whenever your ultimate ends at the enemy’s core.

However, the travel time of the lava wave is different depending on the lane you use it on (mid or bot/top), and the map you’re playing on.

Let’s talk about the details.

On every map, minions spawn 1 second into the game and a new wave will spawn every 30 seconds after that. The second wave will spawn at 0:31 ,the third at 1:01 etc…

So when to use it ?

On most maps, lava wave will take between 15 and 12 seconds to travel the bot/top lanes, so the right time to use the ult on those lanes would be:

  • Between x:15/x:45 and x:18/x:48 (x is the number of minutes)

For example, casting the ult at 13:48 or 11:18 is good, the seconds are what’s important here.

I could give a full list of all travel time for all maps but it would’nt be practical, the important thing to keep in mind here is just not to cast lava wave at 30 seconds or 0 second.
If you cast lava wave on bot/ top lane on any map, you should be casting it around 48 seconds/18seconds, you want it rather too late than too soon. It’s not a big deal if you miss the perfect timing, better safe than sorry.

To give you an idea, it would take 18 seconds for lava wave to travel the largest bot and top lane in the game (warhead junction), so you would want to cast lava wave at an early 45 seconds ; even if it’s not perfect timing (43 sec), it does the job !

Now the middle lane :
Quick tip : if you can, don’t lava wave the mid lane, the lenght is smaller than top and bot lanes and it’s the most accessible lane of the map for depushing.
But if you ever need to lava wave mid to counter a merc push or other, know that in general, the mid lane takes 4 less seconds to travel than the bot and top lane.
So try to lava wave around x:22 and x:52.

Before i conclude, let me warn you about towers of doom :
This map is an exception because the lava wave won’t travel to the enemy’s core and will stop at the tower gates, minions DO spawn at the core however, so that changes things a lot.

The timing for this map is x:24 and x:54 for top and bot lane, this sounds weird uh ? Considering the waves spawn at x:30 and x:00, it would seem that the travel time is only 6 seconds ! But that’s how it is.

Hope you found this useful and not too long, cheers (and sorry if someone did this post already, didn’t see)

TL;DR : Cast lava wave at x:18 and x:48 for optimal usage, bot and top lanes only (x = minutes).
On towers of doom, x:24 and x:54, bot and top lane only.

20 Likes
2

Yeah, on most maps I cast it at xx:15 and xx:45. But I never pick it on ToD.

1 Like
3

This was some incredibly useful info and I was honestly just posting about this yesterday with another user. Having this info like this is awesome… thank you for your time and effort!

1 Like
4

Wonderful guide! We need more like this on the forums :heart:

4 Likes
5

Sorry for the necro but i just want to put this here.

This guide is unfortunately obsolete, in some of my games i observed that sometimes the minions do spawn later than the usual x:01 and x:031 time mark.

It might be map dependant, for example i’ve obversed this anomaly many times on Braxis Holdout.
However on some maps like Cursed hollow, the minion waves will spawn at the normal timing until the late part of the game for some reason where they spawn few seconds later .
Anyway, further investigation is required.

6

X:18 and X:48 are a safe bet for every maps except for ToD which is X:24 and X:54, but it’s also the worst map for Lava Wave anyway even if it’s a 3 lanes map.

2 Likes
7

It depends on the map.

9

That’s probably a bug then, because minion waves are supposed to spawn exactly every 30 seconds. If they’re falling out of rhythm, such as gaining or losing a couple seconds between spawns, there’s probably a rounding error somewhere.